The runners are hired by a metahuman rights activist to protect a pack of ghouls from someone hunting them down. While on a food run, the hunter attacks and follows the fleeing ghouls to their hidey-hole. The runners fortify the ghoul's home, but the hunter breaks in, starts a fire, and everyone (except the runners) dies.

How It Went Down

Returning to Dallas/Fort Worth, the runners find that
20Questions is still gone and that they missed Guttersnipe's
eighteenth birthday. Not to mention 'Snipe's adoption. A guy named
McConnally lost his thirteen year old son in the same explosion that
killed Guttersnipe's father five years ago. McConnally and
Guttersnipe agreed on the adoption a week before 'Snipe's eighteenth
birthday.

That weekend, a woman approaches the runners. She's a metahuman
rights activist who needs help for her friends. A group of metas are
being hunted down by someone and they need protection. The runners
agree to meet the leader of the metas and head out to Dallas's
version of the Barrens. There they find that the metahumans that need
help are ghouls.

Initially reluctant to assist ghouls, the runners (core group)
decide to help out. They visit the ghoul pack's hideout, meeting a
cybered ghoul and a ghoul decker (both infected with the Krieger
strain of HMHVV). There they talk to the only survivor of one of the
attacks. Whatever attacked was swift, silent, and deadly. The ghoul
didn't recognize the scent of the hunter.

The ghoul pack is low on food and they hear of a street gang fight
a few blocks away. Hoping for some fatalities, they grab a few body
bags and head out with the runners. Lynx and Dancing Flame ride out
ahead to scope out the combat zone. There, one of them thinks she saw
something on the rooftops of the four story buildings across the
street.

The ghouls get there just as one gang chases the other off. The
ghouls descend on the ganger's bodies. Hong Lang levitates to the
rooftop with something on it while Guttersnipe and Queensryche keep
an eye on the ghouls. Bishop, Lynx, and Dancing Flame are in the
street. Hong Lang screams as something hidden in the mists and steam
on the rooftop jumps up a good two meters and pulls him down. Bishop,
Flame, and Lynx run up the fire escape to help out. Guttersnipe
watches as Hong Lang's body is thrown from one rooftop to another.
The three combatants get to the roof in time to see a bloody Hong
Lang collapsed on the rooftop and a menacing figure run behind a roof
access door. When they get to where the figure went, they found the
figure had vanished.

The gang and the ghouls beat a hasty retreat to the ghoul hideout
at about 3:30 am. Queensryche downloads a vid picture of the guy that
attacked Hong Lang to Guttersnipe's personal sec'y so that everyone
could see who the person was. The ghouls retire to the top two floors
of the building while the runners decided to crash out in a second
story room letting Lynx take guard duty. Bishop and Hong Lang stayed
up on the fourth floor, playing poker with the Ghouls. About an hour
later, Lynx, making a circuit of the first floor, encounters the man
from the vidpicture in the building, spreading kerosene around the
floor. The man sees her, shushes her, and smiles. She cries out to
the man who then throws her a good five meters. She fires at the man
with her pistol, but the man shrugs off the wound.

Alerted by the gunfire, the rest of the crew run downstairs to
play hide-and-seek with this man until they realize that the man
hunting the ghouls is a vampire and nothing they have seems to be
able to stop him. They realize that they're out of their league and
leave while two earth elementals of Hong Lang's slows the vampire
down. Guttersnipe warns the ghouls that the lair has been invaded
before casting a spell and passing out from the drain. The team
escapes the building, accidentally setting the kerosene ablaze.

After a few taunts by the the vampire, the vampire stays in the
building, killing off the ghouls. Hong Lang parks his car a block
away and heads back in astral form to help the ghouls escape the
building, only to find that the vampire is still in the building,
killing the ghouls. Hong Lang manages to temporarily k.o. the vampire
and push him four stories down into the burning building. The group
scampers off into the night after calling the fire department.

A few days later, the runners catch a short news item regarding
the fire in Grand Prairie - it mentioned that a fire claimed the lives
of several ghouls and a few non-ghouls in the block blaze. A call to
a friend of this mission's Johnson relates the bad news: all the
ghouls were dead. Later that week, Bishop returns to the scene of the
fire and discovers that the fire escape was intact and the exits to
both did work. Discussing the vampire with the initial contact, he
discovers that the vampire was a member of the Humanis policlub who
vanished a week or two ago. One of the bodies found in the blaze was
the vampire's. If the ghouls managed to escape or how they were
killed still remains a mystery.